Growing up in the UK and coming of age in Pakistan, TEDIndia Fellow Asher Hasan observed a vast discrepancy: those with and without access to basic healthcare, and the devastating social consequences of this disparity. He tells TED Blog the story of how he witnessed a single health disaster ruin the hopes of his childhood friends, and how this compelled him to attempt to transform a broken healthcare system with his Pakistan-based health micro-insurance company, Naya Jeevan, which offers not only quality, affordable healthcare to the urban poor, but also the financial and social inclusion the rest of us take for granted.

What does your organization do, and why?

The name Naya Jeevan traces its roots from Sanskrit, and means “new life” in modern Hindi and Urdu. We are committed to bringing low-income families in the emerging world out of poverty by providing them with affordable access to quality healthcare, financial inclusion and socio-economic opportunity. This is important because in many developing countries, catastrophic medical events trigger financial shocks that can decimate low-income families, especially as they have no public support system or safety net.

We collaborate with large, multinational corporations, and cascade our health plan up and down their value chains, essentially targeting low-income businesses and workers — mainly informal workers, domestic workers, factory workers and so on — who are either on the supply side or on the distribution/retail side. We encourage corporate executives and managers to enroll their informal domestic employees. So, for example, you could be a small-hold farmer supplying milk to a dairy company. You could be a retailer — or a micro-retailer, in some rural village — who happens to be selling a basket of products that includes products by Unilever, P&G, and so on.

For example, Unilever, which is re-launching our domestic worker plan this year, encourages its officers and managers to enroll their domestic staff — their drivers, maids and those workers’ families — in our healthcare program. The premiums are deducted from the payroll of the Unilever manager or executive. Or a corporation might directly finance the healthcare of micro-retailers who are selling their products.

The beneficiary can make co-payments, typically by mobile phone, using mobile financial services now widely available in South Asia. Enrollment in a mobile bank account will soon be part of the health plan we offer, because the people we typically serve are also unbanked. This way, they get the additional benefit of building up a financial transactional history that serves as a de facto credit report for them.

Naya Jeevan addresses socio-economic empowerment as well, tackling the informal system of what I call socio-economic apartheid in many developing countries, where there’s a rich, elitist class, and then there’s the other 90% that serves them. The rich get so used to this social dynamic that they almost start treating those who work for them like subhumans. I’ve seen many instances where even friends and family, in certain instances, have abused their domestic staff — yelled at them, beaten them, and so on. It’s absolutely disgusting, and it has to stop. Because this master-servant mindset is still pervasive, employee benefits of any type have never before been extended to these informal employees. Prior to Naya Jeevan, nobody ever considered the possibility of giving health insurance to their maid, or to their driver, or to their driver’s child, for example.

There’s a personal hook to this story…

There’s very much a personal hook to the story. My father was born in India, but some of his family members were raised in Pakistan. As a young man, he went to the UK, so I was born and raised there until I was 11, when my dad passed away from cancer. My mom, who was also born in India but raised in Pakistan, brought us back to Karachi, and I finished my schooling there.

When I first travelled to Pakistan, I was really shocked to see the tremendous disparity between rich and poor — between the elites who had unlimited access to resources and opportunity, and everybody else, who didn’t. I was especially shocked about the lack of access to healthcare in comparison to the UK, where everyone, regardless of income, has access to a national health insurance system, and where, relatively speaking, people of varying incomes have a fairly comparable quality of life.

I had direct exposure to this disparity between rich and poor. My mother had a maid with six kids, who were all within my age range, between 8 and 14. I was 11 when I first moved to Pakistan, and grew very close to these kids. Essentially, they were like my siblings. These kids were brilliant, dynamic — and I’m convinced that if they had the opportunity or had they been born in a different country, they could have become leaders of our country. They were far more intelligent than I was, that was for sure. And even though their parents — the maid and her husband, who was a mechanic — were very committed to educating them, there was a glass ceiling, a predefined trajectory that their lives seemed to be taking.

The year I left for the US for college, their father had a stroke. He’d had many, many years of uncontrolled blood pressure. Typically, in the lifestyle of low-income laborers, there’s no concept of preventive health care. It’s very much crisis management. He was taken to a public hospital, not diagnosed in time, not treated in time, and ended up paralyzed and completely incapacitated.

This had a devastating effect on the family. The kids’ mother, a very proud lady, did not want to depend indefinitely on charity, so she made the rather fateful decision to pull all six kids out of school and place them in different child labor situations. Two ended up in houses working as maids, two ended up on the street selling candy, two ended up working in apprenticeships. All six of them ended up being sexually, physically and psychologically abused.

When I returned to Pakistan during my sophomore year for a visit, I was really disturbed to see the profound impact their father’s incapacitation had on their lives. These once dynamic, bubbly kids who were full of life were completely jaded and disillusioned. It was almost like their lives had been sucked out of them and they had simply given up. Rabia, who is three years older than me, said, “You know, I’m the daughter of a maid and I’m destined to be a maid. This is my ‘kismet’ (fate). We can’t expect to be treated like royalty, or to come out of poverty.” Her father’s stroke was the first trigger event that put me on the path of doing what I do.

A child taking care of her baby brother while her mother, a domestic maid, is busy working. This is a major issue with informal workers, who don’t have access to day-care — leaving them exposed to a variety of social hazards. Photo: Naya Jeevan

What happened next?

I went to medical school in the US, spent a couple of years at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital tinkering around in the research labs, and then moved on to Beth Israel for surgery residency. I then transitioned into the pharma-biotech industry, which ultimately took me to San Diego, land of the cushy lifestyle, during which time I also completed an MBA from NYU. By the summer of 2007, I had acquired scientific acumen and learned some business skills. Materially and intellectually, I guess I was quite enriched, but I felt spiritually bankrupt. I think my spirit was very restless at that time and craved something more meaningful. I got another jolt in 2005, when my mother, a diabetic for many years, also ended up having a massive stroke. She was taken to one of the best hospitals — in fact, she only lived about 10 minutes away from one of the best hospitals in the country — but she died on the way there.

My mother’s death was another powerful trigger event for me. It was like someone drilling a message into my brain: “Wake up, stupid! You have lived and witnessed socio-economic apartheid, you have accumulated all this technical expertise, you understand the healthcare system, you understand the Desi culture, you speak the language, so what are you doing about changing the system?” I had to look deep inside myself in search of an answer to that question.

I started thinking seriously about what I needed to do to change the direction of my self-centered life and to do something to tackle this issue head-on. Ultimately, if we want to get both people and developing countries out of vicious cycles of poverty and aid dependency, we need to do everything we can to create the scaffolding that will enable them to build their own way out. Given my background, I thought, “Okay, I need to come up with a healthcare model that’s sustainable, scalable, replicable, and will help to transform or catalyze the transformation of the healthcare system in Pakistan and subsequently in other emerging nations.”

I left the biotech industry, took a quantum leap of faith and and plunged full time into tackling this issue. I took a bunch of graduate students with me to Pakistan and India, and we did a fairly thorough, three-month landscape analysis of the health systems there to understand the nature of the beast. We looked at the health care systems, the stakeholders, the role of the private sector, the role of the corporations, the role of the public sector, public health systems. It was a fairly rigorous assessment of what the status quo was, what the unmet needs were. We interviewed a lot of our potential customers — low-income beneficiaries — to better understand their needs.

What did you find?

We realized, during that assessment, that there was actually a fairly robust private health insurance system in place in both countries, but only the corporate elite had access to it. So if you happened to be working for Coca-Cola, or for P&G, or for Unilever, then you were included in the system — otherwise you were excluded from it. Most people in India and Pakistan were not even aware that such a system existed. It works much like it does in the US, where you have access to a network of hospitals. You show your membership or health plan card, and you get treated. The same system was growing and developing in both India and in Pakistan. So we thought, rather than reinventing the wheel, why not just leverage this system but enhance it by adding features that would address the needs of the marginalized?

We started meeting with various health insurance companies and negotiating large group health plans. If we were to enroll 500,000 lives, what is the best price they could give us? Along the way, we realized that we needed to wrap these health insurance plans with services that also met the immediate, tangible needs of the marginalized.

What are some of those needs?

Health insurance in many developing countries tends to be catastrophic in nature — mostly hospital based. Healthcare in the primary, or outpatient setting, is typically unregulated. It’s very difficult for insurance companies to monitor or verify appropriate treatment. So they choose to mitigate their risk by just focusing on inpatient hospital-based care, which is easier to monitor and regulate. Yet the marginalized actually need greater access to primary care — primarily because of the higher-risk, more polluted environments they live and work in. The challenge for us was how to address these needs in a scalable way?

We started providing our members with 24-7 mobile phone access to family doctors, who would also have examined each patient that would help establish a baseline heath assesment to identify latent or hidden disease. After that assessment, we’d basically provide large employer groups with a group risk profile of their worker population, and recommend and deliver customized interventions, interactive preventive health workshops, or health education seminars. If we notice that there’s a group of women working in a factory who perhaps don’t know enough about breast cancer prevention, we’d conduct a workshop on breast cancer screening and self-examination given by one of our doctors.

We also recognized that a lot of poor people feel really intimidated when they walk into a gleaming private hospital with lots of sophisticated medical equipment. It’s unnerving and disorienting for them. Historically, they’ve also been discriminated against in those environments. In order to make them feel more comfortable, our family doctors also serve as liaisons, navigators and patient advocates. They will speak in advance to the hospital’s treating physician, and say, “I’m sending my patient to you; please make sure they get good, quality care.”

If we receive customer complaints or reports of substandard treatment or any kind of social discrimination, the care provider and hospital don’t get reimbursed for that care. This financial penalty creates a kind of a check and balance to make sure that our members don’t face discrimination or get pushed down the list to make way for higher-income patients. Social prejudice was a major concern when we first started enrolling our low-income members, so this is something we remain vigilant about.

Safiya, a resident of an urban slum in Karachi. Photo: Naya Jeevan

Given that there has been no culture in Pakistan around helping the underserved, how did you suddenly bridge that gap?

That’s a very good question, and this is where I think generation X and Y are playing a huge, catalytic role. What we have seen is that the early adopters of our health plan for the marginalized have been younger, more globally connected entrepreneurs and corporate business people, who tend to be in their 20s and 30s, and understand the benefits of this. I have witnessed more empathy from them than generations that preceded them. The younger generations realize that it’s not only unfair, but that there’s just something intrinsically and morally wrong about this social injustice.

So the millennials and Ys have kept us in business. The good news is that the demographics are shifting rapidly in that direction. Two-thirds of Pakistan is now below the age of 25, so the demographics are increasingly in our favor. We’re optimistic that we’re close to the “tipping point” that Malcolm Gladwell refers to, and on the verge of really taking off in a big way. But it is absolutely true that health insurance for low-income workers remains a big paradigm shift for many employers — both informal employers and formal employers, as well as employers who contract in services. A lot of people circumvent the law — which they also do in the US, by the way — by hiring a contract-based workforce. If you’re a contractee, or you’re part-time, you’re not entitled to benefits. It’s exactly the same in the US.

But in Pakistan, because the cost of that benefit is so cheap (only $2 per person per month), we have been able to convince a lot of employers to enroll their part-time or contractual staff into these plans as well. A lot of corporations are doing that it. Two dollars per person per month is a drop in the ocean for many of these large companies.

How does this service directly benefit corporations?

For our corporate clients, insuring employees has proven very valuable, because there have been a multitude of cases we have screened and isolated where client-facing employees could have potentially passed on airborne infectious disease to clients, which would have been a PR fiasco. One particular company came to us as soon as one of their field representatives, who was a contract employee died in a road accident. They suddenly realized after this tragedy that they were exposing themselves to a lot of reputational risk, and that they needed to protect all of their field workers.

So sometimes it’s reactionary, but sometimes it’s also proactive. The ultimate form of asset protection is human asset protection — that’s what health insurance is. I think some companies are beginning to understand that it’s no longer sustainable for them to maximize profits in the short term at the expense of long-term externalities.

How many people do you now serve, and what is in store for future?

Currently, about 250,000 urban slum dwellers have access to our primary care plan, and an additional 68,000 members have been enrolled in our health insurance plan across 90 companies over the past four years. To achieve sustainability, we need to get to 150,000 insured lives. Those of us who are more optimistic have projected for Q2 of 2015; those who are more conservative have projected for Q2 2016. So, knock on wood — let’s see if we can make it sooner rather than later! It’s pretty ambitious, but, you know, we’re a fairly ambitious bunch of people.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/working-for-the-health-of-the-many-how-asher-hasan-is-bringing-insurance-coverage-to-pakistans-low-income-workers/feed/7Blog_FF_AsherHasan_CleanmmechinitaBlog_FF_AsherHasanA child taking care of her baby brother while her mother, a domestic maid, is busy working. This is a major issues with informal workers, who don't have access to day-care -- leaving them exposed to a variety of social hazards. Photo: Naya Jeevan Safiya, a resident of an urban slum in Karachi. Photo: Naya JeevanWhy I document the often violent and traumatic daily lives of others: Fellows Friday with photographer Jon Lowensteinhttp://blog.ted.com/q-and-a-with-photographer-jon-lowenstein/
http://blog.ted.com/q-and-a-with-photographer-jon-lowenstein/#commentsFri, 06 Dec 2013 22:30:32 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=84534[…]]]>

Social violence in Guatemala, Mexican and Central American migrant communities in the United States, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, children with cerebral malaria in Uganda — for the past decade, photographer Jon Lowenstein has been documenting the often violent and traumatic daily lives of individuals and communities living at the edges of society, both around the world and on his own doorstep in the South Side of Chicago. At times raw and riveting, at others poignant and impressionistic, Lowenstein’s work captures human experience on an intimate level, no matter the circumstances. Most recently, he was in Chile in the run-up to the November 2013 presidential elections, working in partnership with his brother Jeff Kelly Lowenstein to document Chile’s people 40 years after the coup overthrowing President Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet. Images were live-streamed on the New Yorker’s Instagram feed, and the brothers posted a series of three articles, titled “Enduring Rifts,” in the New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog.

Here, Lowenstein talks to the TED Blog about how he carries out his work and how he connects with his subjects, and takes us deeper into the worlds behind his powerful images.

How long have you been documenting Chicago’s South Side?

I started on a photo project involving more than 200 photographers documenting the city of Chicago at the millennium, called Chicago in the Year 2000. From there, I was hired by the founder of Land’s End, Gary Comer, to teach at his former elementary school, in the South Side neighborhood where he grew up. This neighborhood had changed dramatically over 50 years from a mostly white, ethnic neighborhood to a black neighborhood in the mid-’60s. In the ’70s and ’80s, after most of the factories closed, crack came in in a pretty hardcore way, and like many post-industrial neighborhoods on the South Side, it hit much harder times. Gary had decided to help rebuild it, and I worked for several years teaching at the school, Paul Revere Elementary. This led me to do a project about the South Side, documenting the post-industrial community from where the meltdown happened to when Starbucks came in, which is where we’re at now. There’s a real pressure to redevelop and repackage these neighborhoods and sell them, essentially, to a more wealthy clientele.

I’ve chosen various ways of telling the story. At the school, I did a two-year project called “The Voices In the Hall” to challenge the stereotypes of the failing inner city school. This led to the South Side Project, which involved photographing the community with a Polaroid in a collaborative fashion. I’ve also started to do more experimental documentary filmmaking — featured in the New Yorker as “A Violent Thread.”

Most recently, I launched a space in my building called the Island. This experimental art space converts several vacant apartments in our cooperative into unique spaces to create conversations, art and ideas for social change.

What is your ultimate goal with your work in the South Side?

My long-term goal is to examine the impact of the post-industrial meltdown on Chicago’s most vulnerable communities and come up with new solutions, and to consider why the United States continues to ignore our most impoverished people. During the past decade, the city has lost in excess of 250,000 African-Americans. For a place that was one of the epicenters of African-American culture during the 20th century, this is a monumental change that’s getting little attention.

One example of this is the wholesale destruction and displacement of Chicago Housing Authority’s public housing projects — some of the largest in the United States — came down in the past decade. You see this kind of change going on all over the world.

Uncle Al holds up his niece at Sam Binion’s house on the 7200 block of S. Ellis. The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there.

A man poses wearing his mask from the Friday the 13th movies. He stand in front of Jimbo’s Bar, which was a local legendary establishment in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Bridgeport, home to Mayor Richard J. Daley, was known as one of the most brutally racist neighborhoods in the city and to this day has resisted integration by African-Americans, although many Asians and Latinos have moved into the neighborhood in the past few years.

Just minutes after a double shooting a man lies in an alley near the 7100 S. Rhodes block in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. The shooting was in apparent retaliation to a shooting that had happened the previous day. In “Chi-Raq,” more young people have died in the past five years than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. There still is not one trauma unit anywhere on the South Side, despite the fact that the city leads the country in the number of homicides, with the majority occurring south of the Loop. But to understand what’s at stake, we must look far deeper than the latest crime scene to see the immense waste of human potential that’s being lost with each violent act. The media’s never-ending focus on the violence obscures a larger and far more significant truth: that the wholesale neglect has led to the practical destruction of these communities.

Where do the people go?

All over. They came to places like my neighborhood, they go to other cities in the Midwest. Iowa City, Champaign, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, Gary, you name it…they go there, but mostly places which will accept Section 8 vouchers. About 100,000 of Chicago’s poorest people were displaced during the CHA’s Plan for Transformation. My issue is that the city is consistently privatizing public services. During the past decade, Chicago has destroyed the public housing system, privatized the parking meters, oversaw the largest single school closing in US history and leads the country in murders. We are not addressing the basic needs of the most vulnerable people and finding ways to include everyone.

The issues are difficult, but the plans need to include holistic approaches to community and to creating better, more viable options for our citizens. This includes affordable housing, high level schools that encourage independent and innovative thinking, safe neighborhoods where young people don’t have to worry about being shot, good jobs at all levels of society and a functioning and powerful healthcare system that serves all strata of the population. Right now, I see mass foreclosures, wholesale school closings, murdered kids, no trauma unit on the South Side, which consistently leads the country in homicide numbers.

How do you get access to places and people? Do you approach them directly?

It depends on the story. Sometimes I write official letters requesting access. I read the newspaper. Sometimes it is word of mouth, and on the South Side I live in the neighborhood, so I walk around, and go to the crime scenes. When I was covering violence a lot, I’d just go to the murder site and start talking to people, or do ride-alongs with the police. Sometimes the victims themselves reach out. There are lots of ways to find stories, but most important is to keep your eyes, ears and heart open.

I tell them I’m a documentary photographer, and I’m working on a book, or a film. People want to know why you’re there. They want to know, “What you care about?” I’m most often seen as an outsider so often my presence is questioned, but if you are honest and speak clearly from the heart, most people will accept you.

You make it sound so easy.

It’s definitely not easy. But it’s just what I do. I’ve been doing it for a long time and believe in it. I believe I should be there to witness what’s going on.

Do you consider yourself an art photographer, documentary photographer, or journalist?

I consider myself a photographer and artist and journalist. I guess those labels can sometimes kind of rein you in to a certain way of working that can be good because it creates a structure — but it can also confine you, and confine the way you think about things.

When you work within a certain construct — such as a journalism construct — there are all these rules. Then as a documentary photographer, those rules become a little different. Then as an artist, there are no rules. Right? So I think I’m going more towards no rules, because I ultimately believe that you should be able to communicate the truth, and your own vision of what you see and believe in. My way of storytelling is not literal. My approach is a little more on the artistic and interpretive side. I believe much more in sharing the way I experience things. When people look at my books or films, it’s meant to be more experiential than didactic.

There’s an intersection between these worlds I love to work with, and I’m exploring them in different ways. When I work within a journalistic context, yes, I do follow journalistic ethics. I really enjoy checking out the world as it is. I guess that’s where the documentary side of me comes from.

You’re interested in seeing the world as it is — yet you work a lot in black and white. Why?

Black-and-white lets you kind of capture the feeling of a place. I try to choose the technique I use dependent on what I’m trying to communicate. So sometimes I choose black and white, sometimes color, sometimes digital, sometimes film. But it’s always a question mark that I consider before I start and keep exploring while on the project. In the Shadow Lives project, for example, I started out in black and white, but the people I was photographing were asking why I didn’t use color. So I started shooting color. But then the pictures really changed. They just became too much, too literal. So I went back to black and white.

But then in Guatemala, where I was covering the impact of social violence on the local working class and poor populations, I was seeing this really intense violence. It was so close and personal. I was able to walk into the crime scenes and there was absolutely no filter at all. I thought maybe in black and white was abstracting it too much. I wanted it to be very real, very in-your-face, a palpable experience. So I worked in color. It’s really just a visceral experience as you’re shooting, like, “Oh man, this is working.”

Residents of Mixco, a suburb of Guatemala City, look at a bus where the driver was gunned down on Valentine’s Day.

Sixth Street and 14th Avenue Zone 1. Elvira Castillo mourns the death of her only son Carlos Arturo de Leon Castillo, 30, who was murdered at his office job during the middle of a late December afternoon. Witnesses said the murderer walked in to the office, shot the man and then calmly got on his motorcycle and drove off.

The Masochista is an event that takes place three times a week at the Mediterranean Club in Guatemala City. Men volunteer to be whipped by the women who work at the club. If the man can withstand the beating for a record time then he wins 5,000 quetzales, 6 bottles of whiskey and at least 2 to 4 prostitutes. Often the men are turned bloody by being whipped and on this night the women, four of whom were whipping this man with leather belts, broke down crying in total exhaustion. He did break the record and lasted more than 142 seconds of straight whipping.

With the South Side project, I used Polaroid for very specific reasons. First of all, I could be on the street (in 2003, 2004, it still wasn’t common to have camera phones) and give my subjects the pictures. It would create this kind of really nice bond, a sense of trust, a little bit of giving back right away. It’s much more collaborative. Additionally, the Polaroid camera occupied a really special place within nightlife scene in Chicago: at the clubs, you’d have these guys who’d go around and sell Polaroids to the patrons. So there was a certain level of nostalgia about the Polaroid. It harks back to a time when people were coming to Chicago and starting a new life, and there was a sense of hope and freedom and escape from, in a sense, the Jim Crow South. So the technique is a way to connect the past with the present, to bring memory and history into the reality of where we are today.

You’ve been using your iPhone and Instagram in your work in Uganda and now in Chile. What made you embrace these new tools?

I love trying new techniques. I’m kind of old school with a new-school twist. When I was in Uganda working on the “A Few More Breaths” project with the Massachusetts Center for Global Health and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, I was documenting the impact of a medical study which is testing the impact of inhaled nitric oxide on children with cerebral malaria. It’s very serious and intimate work, and I had to make sure I was respecting everyone involved, from the nurses, doctors to above all the families who were coming in with their dying babies in their arms.

Even after I’d been on the baby ward for some time, the doctors and nurses still couldn’t get used to my big camera. With the iPhone, it was silent, and people would just let me take the pictures. So the whole project grew out of that. Big cameras represent a different world, a place that many of the patients had no access to.

In Chile, I brought film and all the larger digital cameras, but I had a feeling of connecting visually to the sense of how the memory of the coup plays into present day society. Memory and trauma are powerful and stay with us, especially when there’s no way to deal with them and find resolution. My brother and I interviewed a woman whose father was disappeared 40 years ago. When she started to talk about it she broke down, and it was as if it had happened last week. She had only begun to deal with the emotions. That was a powerful lesson to me about trauma. People had told me that trauma stays in the body, but witnessing it is another thing entirely.

I’m just starting to find my place and what I want to do with Instagram. Again, the technique has to go with subject, which has to go with a concept of communication. Just simply posting random pictures on Instagram is fine, but it’s not what I want to do, you know? Each tool I use must have a purpose, to get work and ideas out, and to spark a conversation. I’ve seen some really cool people doing amazing work on Instagram. It’s a conversation that, when done well, spreads worldwide.

Baby Betty arrived home with her mother after almost two weeks of intensive treatment and admission to a pilot trial of inhaled nitric oxide to treat cerebral malaria in Mbarara, Uganda, at the Hospital of the Mbarara University of Science and Technology. Cerebral malaria kills thousands of children each year. The study tests to see whether breathing nitric oxide (NO) will be a safe anti-inflammatory adjuvant treatment, rapidly reducing brain inflammation. Breathing NO should increase brain tissue blood flow, and provide better healing of the brain injury produced by malaria parasites, which cause plugging of the brain’s blood vessels. Betty survived, but had sequelae. She should make a full recovery.

A doctor checks his watch as he and his fellow medical workers try to save the life of a young cerebral malaria patient admitted to the pilot trial of inhaled nitric oxide. Mbarara, Uganda, Hospital of the Mbarara University of Science and Technology.

With the Island project, are you trying to offer a sort of a foothold for gentrification not to happen?

It’s another way to think about a place that, for the most part, most people don’t want to go. So my question is, how do we bring people to this place and start to make them feel it’s cool, and give them a different way of being here besides development and gentrification? It’s to bring community together and experiment with art and having a conversation that’s both about the community, but also expanding the concept of what the community is.

It’s also bringing different classes of people together in the community. Middle class people don’t want to move here because the neighborhood has few services, high levels of violence and also because of certain prejudices about the community. In the midst of this, my building is a 1928 cooperative on the national register of historic buildings, right on the shores of Lake Michigan. I walk out my back yard and I’m swimming, yet I walk out the front door and one block over young folks are hanging and shooting one another. It’s a trip. It’s like the past and the present all in one. Many people in my building don’t really associate with the more poor and working class folks in the community. They moved here because they saw it as a bit more upscale. It’s gorgeous. And at the same time everyone’s growing older and the building is falling apart around us. So people in the building call this place the Island. This of course has positive and negative connotations.

What will you be doing in the vacant spaces?

In December we’ll invite artists and community members together to talk, and there’ll be music, art, photography and food. We’ll break bread together. Then in the winter, we’re going to set up a 1860s wet-plate lab in the building, where we’re going to photograph and interview the residents of this building, most of whom are elderly.

Last year, I was just photographing the impact of social violence in the community for years — but I’d come home, and my neighbors were dying. Amazing people who had lived powerful lives, doctors, lawyers, social activists and educators. I didn’t know them well, but I’ve just watched them slow down and die. My next door neighbor had a stroke, the other one in the apartment across, his wife passed away. She was 93. At the same time, on the street was seeing these young folks being killed prematurely, killing each other. I was thinking about how can we bring these seemingly disparate conversations and generations together?

So it’s an art project, an architecture project, an oral history project — and also a way to preserve stories of people who really have had an influential impact in the community over their lifetime. Above all I want it to be fun and a place to get together and get to know each other. Safe places to share, brainstorm and create are too far and few between here.

A Mexican migrant crosses the Rio Grande on his way to the United States near McAllen, Texas. Although Arizona has become more infamous for its desert crossings and the high numbers of deaths from exposure, migrants do die in the shifting waters of the Rio Grande River. These migrants arrived safely at their destination. During the past decade, millions of Mexican and Central American migrants have left their homes and families, faced death on the journey to the United States and lived under the specter of criminality once in this country. Despite these obstacles, these resilient immigrants are transforming American culture and posing fundamental questions of justice, citizenship, and labor to the country.

Gabriela Cruz gives birth to her first American-born child in Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Many migrants seek to give birth to children in the United States. Gabriela and her husband, Chava, have five children; the child in this photograph was the only born in the United States. The couple comes from Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico and married when Chava was 12 years old and Gabriela was 13.

A night training operation by the United States Border Patrol Special Response Team Training in New Mexico. The photograph was made through night vision glasses.

At the inauguration of the first Back of the Yards Worker Center, 4314 S. Hermitage Ave., the Latino Union of Chicago held a barbecue that cousins Rosa and Ruben Solis enjoyed. The Solis family lives in the front of the house, while the worker center is located at the back. The center was founded by the Latino Union to offer day laborers an alternative to the many temporary employment agencies that dot the city and offer their employees minimum wage and no benefits. The worker center has since closed, but the Latino Union still advocates for Latino immigrants on Chicago’s South Side.

Tell me about Shadow Lives, your documentary project following the migrant trail from Central America and Mexico to the US and back. How is it different from other immigrant narratives?

This narrative is more often told in a very linear and circular sense. You leave home, you cross the border, you come to the US, and maybe go home, get deported or whatever. My experience of this is much more disjunctive, and what I’ve tried to do in the book I’m putting together is to get across that feeling of never quite being comfortable or feeling at home again once you leave your native land.

My friend Willmer Cabrera’s mother just died the other day in Guatemala of kidney failure. Willmer’s undocumented and lives in Chicago. I worked very closely with his brother German in Guatemala for more than two years; he helped me gain access to most of the violence pictures I took in Guatemala City. I helped German get a five-year journalist visa, and he came to the US and lived with me for a year before moving out. Then Willmer came up, but he crossed the border illegally.

When their mother died, Willmer couldn’t go home. Rather, he could, but then he wouldn’t be able to come back, and then he couldn’t provide for his family, right? So instead of being able to fly home and bury his mother, he’s seeing these pictures of his mother sick and dying on his smart phone. And in a way, both sides are trapped and separated. This distance is profound. The separation and disjunctive reality of that experience is not really communicated very well in a lot of reports that I’ve seen. To me, that is the essential experience.

Being this guy, all alone on the South Side of Chicago trying to make a living and totally isolated from his family. What does that feel like? How do reconcile those worlds, those experiences, the love, the hate, the political impact of the border, of the violence, of the space between intense poverty and the dream of something better? The book I’m now editing of this work is portraying this experience. I’ve worked for more than a decade so I cab get inside the skin of the story and then translate it. It’s a very intimate, personal, life-changing experience that millions of people have undertaken. This is the largest trans-national migration probably in world history.

You often dive into humanity’s most intensely dark themes — poverty, violence, social injustice, disease. Why?

I definitely have, over the last decade, spent a lot of time in some pretty difficult circumstances. But the reason I photograph these themes is because these are people and places that are systematically ignored, right? For example, migrants, undocumented folks who risk their lives and put everything on the line to come to the United States to work, often in the service sector, and are shunned. These are stories people don’t want to hear. I believe this is stuff we should talk about. Their stories are just as valid as my story or your story. It’s amazing how, in a place where the majority of people who live in the United States come from somewhere else, there can be so much anti-immigrant sentiment built into our fabric. There’s a self-hatred of ourselves in the xenophobic hatred of “the migrant.”

My father’s family escaped Nazi Germany, which wasn’t all that long ago. That could happen at any time to our family again, or it could happen to your friends, or it could be your friends who are currently fighting to survive and not be deported. So when people say, “Oh, you’re photographing the black community, you’re photographing the Hispanic community,” I say: “These are people.” Yes, of course there are issues of identity, race, and representation. But at the end of the day, we’re all humans. Community is community. You want a safe place to live. You want to have opportunity to educate your child. Decent healthcare. All people want to be safe, to have a roof over their heads, to have food, and to have freedom to express themselves.

When you’re putting yourself in these incredibly dark environments and situations, right in the midst of people who are suffering unspeakable things, how does that affect you, coming back to what is essentially a much more comfortable life? Is it difficult, sometimes, to leave behind?

Sometimes the hardest thing about it is making a choice and you never know what you will witness. A couple weeks ago, I was driving home about ten at night, and saw police lights. And I had a choice: do I just drive home and avoid it, or do I go see what’s going on? And then I got to the scene, literally like down the street from my house, of really unspeakable pain. Three people were killed that night.

And there’s a young man walking down the street screaming into a phone. They killed him. This brother’s twin was killed just moments before, and he’s screaming, and the cops are sort of corralling people trying to control the crime scene and crowd. And this young girl, like six years old, whose older brother was lying on the ground shot, is trying to get across the police line to her mother. She is screaming, and she makes a dash for it. The police officer grabs her, throws her back, and she’s sitting there screaming, “I hate you, I hate you!” The cop’s like, “Why do you hate us?” “You killed my brother, you killed my brother!”

You know what I mean? Coming back from that, it’s just … what do you do, you know? What do you do? That imprint will stay with her forever. And that’s right down the street. That’s not some foreign country. These are my fellow community members. Everyday folks just trying to find a way to survive and stay alive.

I try not to let it affect me too much. I try to give myself time away from it. What gets me down, what pisses me off, is the stupidity. Like, man — why? Why? Why do people hate each other so much, when they’re really from the same circumstances?

One of Lowenstein’s Polaroids taken in his neighborhood, the South Side of Chicago.

Another Polaroid taken on the South Side of Chicago.

How would you sum up what you do?

What I think about more than anything is the power of narratives. In the South Side community, for example, I ask, “What are the narratives that are really important? What are people allowed to think about, for their lives?” The narrative of the young gangster, gang-banger, for example, is really appealing to young kids. For adolescent males, the narrative of being tough and bad is just really appealing.

But if those are the only narratives for young men, then that becomes really difficult. I was interviewing some 10-year-old boys at a local boxing ring. I said, “What do you want to do?” “Oh, I want to be a rapper. I want to be a basketball player. I want to be a rap star.” These are the narratives that are available to these boys. We have to create spaces for new narratives, so that people can visualize their own lives in a different way — which is half the battle, I believe.

And as I continue to witness the reality of life in our world, I am increasingly thankful to have been given the chance at immense possibility. This is a gift. So I feel it’s important to use my time for something that can, hopefully, have some good impact.

Stay up to date with Jon Lowenstein’s latest work. Follow him @jonlowenstein on Instagram.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/q-and-a-with-photographer-jon-lowenstein/feed/13Nota Roja - Guatemala CitymmechinitaBlog_FF_JonLowensteinUncle Al holds up his niece at Sam Binion’s house on the 7200 block of S. Ellis. The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there.A man poses wearing his mask from the Friday the 13th movies. He stand in front of Jimbo's Bar, which was a local legendary establishment in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Bridgeport, home to Mayor Richard J. Daley, was known as one of the most brutally racist neighborhoods in the city and to this day has resisted integration by African-Americans, although many Asians and Latinos have moved into the neighborhood in the past few years.Just minutes after a double shooting a man lies in an alley near the 7100 S. Rhodes block in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The shooting was in apparent retaliation to a shooting that had happened the previous day. In "Chi-Raq," more young people have died in the past five years than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. There still is not one trauma unit anywhere on the South Side, despite the fact that the city leads the country in the number of homicides, with the majority occurring south of the Loop. But to understand what’s at stake, we must look far deeper than the latest crime scene to see the immense waste of human potential that’s being lost with each violent act. The media's never-ending focus on the violence obscures a larger and far more significant truth: that the wholesale neglect has led to the practical destruction of these communities. Residents of Mixco, a suburb of Guatemala City, look at a bus where the driver was gunned down on Valentine's Day.Sixth Street and 14th Avenue Zone 1. Elvira Castillo mourns the death of her only son Carlos Arturo de Leon Castillo, 30, who was murdered at his office job during the middle of a late December afternoon. Witnesses said the murderer walked in to the office, shot the man and then calmly got on his motorcycle and drove off.The Masochista is an event that takes place three times a week at the Mediterranean Club in Guatemala City. Men volunteer to be whipped by the women who work at the club. If the man can withstand the beating for a record time then he wins 5,000 quetzales, 6 bottles of whiskey and at least 2 to 4 prostitutes. Often the men are turned bloody by being whipped and on this night the women, four of whom were whipping this man with leather belts, broke down crying in total exhaustion. He did break the record and lasted more than 142 seconds of straight whipping.Photos from iNO Uganda, documenting the impact of inhaled nitrogen on children with cerebral malaria.2011_Lowenstein_UGANDA_NOVEMBER_05766A Mexican migrant crosses the Rio Grande on his way to the United States near McAllen, Texas. Although Arizona has become more infamous for its desert crossings and the high numbers of deaths from exposure, migrants do die in the shifting waters of the Rio Grande River. These migrants arrived safely at their destination. During the past decade, millions of Mexican and Central American migrants have left their homes and families, faced death on the journey to the United States and lived under the specter of criminality once in this country. Despite these obstacles, these resilient immigrants are transforming American culture and posing fundamental questions of justice, citizenship, and labor to the country.Gabriela Cruz gives birth to her first American-born child in Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Many migrants seek to give birth to children in the United States. Gabriela and her husband, Chava, have five children; the child in this photograph was the only born in the United States. The couple comes from Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico and married when Chava was 12 years old and Gabriela was 13.A night training operation by the United States Border Patrol Special Response Team Training in New Mexico. The photograph was made through night vision glasses.At the inauguration of the first Back of the Yards Worker Center, 4314 S. Hermitage Ave., the Latino Union of Chicago held a barbecue that cousins Rosa and Ruben Solis enjoyed. The Solis family lives in the front of the house, while the worker center is located at the back. The center was founded by the Latino Union to offer day laborers an alternative to the many temporary employment agencies that dot the city and offer their employees minimum wage and no benefits. The worker center has since closed, but the Latino Union still advocates for Latino immigrants on Chicago's South Side. One of Lowenstein’s Polaroids taken in his neighborhood, the South Side of Chicago.Another Polaroid taken on the South Side of Chicago.From hunger to hope: Joseph Kim at TEDGlobal 2013http://blog.ted.com/from-hunger-to-hope-joseph-kim-at-tedglobal-2013/
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Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“North Korea is often in the news, conjuring images of missiles, weapons, dictatorships and sometimes eccentric habits,” says Adrian Hong, TED Fellow and guest curator of Session 9, Forces of Change at TEDGlobal 2013. “But underneath all that bluster is a country racked by starvation, by oppression, by fear, by concentration camps. In many ways, it represents a stain on the soul of humanity that it exists this way in 2013.” With these words, he introduces us to Joseph Kim, who at the age of 16 escaped starvation in North Korea to find hope and a new chance at life in the United States.

In his quietly powerful first-person account, Joseph tells us about a family — a father, mother and older sister — constantly struggling against poverty. In the Great Famine of 1994, the 4-year-old Joseph and his sister would look for firewood from 5am until midnight. More than 1 million North Koreans died of starvation during that time. No one thought about politics and freedom, he says. “Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness.”

In 2003, when Kim was 13, he watched his father starve to death. That same year, his mother disappeared, and his sister left for China, promising to come back soon with money and food. As they had never before been parted, Joseph didn’t hug her goodbye — “It was the biggest mistake I ever made.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Suddenly, Joseph was an orphan, left to survive on his own by begging, scavenging and taking occasional work in the coal mines, 33 meters underground with no protection, up to 16 hours a day. “When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped the next morning my sister would come back to wake me up with food. That hope kept me alive.” After three years, understanding he could no longer survive this way, he decided to go to China to look for her himself.

In February 2006, Kim made the risky crossing during the day because he was afraid of the dark, knowing that if the North Korean border control caught him he would be shot, and if the Chinese authorities caught him he’d be sent back to face severe punishment. Once in China, he was continuously anxious about being captured, but luckily found help in an underground shelter run for North Koreans. Later that year, an activist helped him escape to the US as a refugee.

Kim was adopted by a foster family and sent to high school — something that seemed “ridiculous” to Kim, who’d never even been to middle school. One day, at dinner, Kim wanted an extra chicken wing, and seeing there was not enough for everyone to have seconds, didn’t take it. He looked down and saw it on his plate — his foster father had given him the last wing. “It made me think of my biological father, who sacrificed everything for me even if he was hungry. I felt suffocated that I had so much food in America. My only wish that night was to cook a meal for my father. I thought about what else I could do to honor him, and decided to take school seriously for the first time in my life.” Kim made the Dean’s list in his first semester of high school.

“That chicken wing changed my life,” says Kim. “Hope is personal. Hope is something that no one can give to you. You have to choose to believe in it. You have to make it yourself.” He asks his audience for help, saying, “My foster father didn’t intend to change my life — and in the same way you may also change someone else’s life with the smallest act of love. I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph’s life, and thousands of others who are hoping to survive.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

At the end of Kim’s talk, Hong asked whether, on the off chance that his sister might see this talk online, he would like to send her a message. Here’s what he said:

“It has been already ten years that I haven’t seen you. I just wanted to say that I miss you and I love you, and I know you promised me that you would come back with food and money soon, but although it would be great to have food from you, please don’t worry about that. I’m so sorry. It’s okay if you can’t make money or bring food, but please come back to me and stay alive. I still haven’t given up my hope to see you. I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you, and I promise I will not cry again. I’m just looking forward to seeing you, and please come back. If you can find me, I will also look for you and I hope to see you one day.

He also sent a message to his mother: “I know I haven’t spent much time with you, but I know you love me and probably think about me and pray for me. I just want to say thank you for letting me be in this world. Thank you.”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/from-hunger-to-hope-joseph-kim-at-tedglobal-2013/feed/13TG2013_050593_D41_6091mmechinitaTG2013_050174_DSC_6064TG2013_050544_D41_6042TG2013_050620_D41_61185 powerful talks about the quest for equality in the United Stateshttp://blog.ted.com/5-powerful-talks-about-the-quest-for-equality-in-the-united-states/
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Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Freeman Hrabowski was a 9th grader in Birmingham, Alabama, when he heard a dynamic, impassioned speaker at church — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time, King was organizing a march for children, and Hrabowski begged his parents to let him be a part of it.

Freeman Hrabowski: 4 pillars of college success in science
Hrabowski won their blessing to march in the Children’s Crusade, a pivotal moment in the American Civil Rights Movement in 1963. He was taken to jail for participating, even though he was just 12-years-old. In today’s talk, Hrabowski shares the words that King said to him and the others inside the jailhouse: “What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born.”

Today, Hrabowski is the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a college that serves students of all backgrounds and that is known for supporting students of color in two areas of study where they are severely underrepresented — science and engineering. The school currently leads the country in graduating African-Americans who go on complete Ph.Ds and MD/Ph.Ds in these fields.

In today’s talk, Hrabowski notes that only 20% of Black and Latino students who start out as pre-med or pre-engineering stick with these demanding majors. That said, the numbers are low in other groups, too — only 32% of white students and 42% of Asian-American students who start rigorous science and engineering majors complete them. “It’s not just minorities who don’t do well in science and engineering,” says Hrabowski. “Students in general are not making it.”

To hear Hrabowski’s four pillars for setting students up to succeed in science and engineering, watch this talk. As Hrabowski says, these guidelines were designed at UMBC to “help minorities students,” but they can also “help students in general.”

It’s been 50 years since Hrabowski went to jail for marching for equality. Much has changed since then and, yet, so any inequalities persist in the United States. Here, four more talks about heartbreaking imbalances still in play today.

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice
Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice
In the eyes of the American judicial system, we are not one and the same, says public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson. A third of the country’s black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives – a statistic that should give us all pause. In this powerful talk from TED2012, Stevenson gives a rousing critique of a judicial system that “treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”

iO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gay
iO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gay
Photographer iO Tillett Wright has been in love with men, and she’s been in love with women. Though marriage was far from her mind in 2008, when California’s Proposition 8 sparked a national debate over gay marriage, the conversation still struck her like a punch. She embarked on a fascinating photo project to document the LGBTQ spectrum and the many, many different shades that exist along it.

Aaron Huey: America's native prisoners of war
Aaron Huey: America’s native prisoners of war
Photographer Aaron Huey headed to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to record images of people living in poverty. There, a shocking 90% of residents live below the poverty line and life expectancy for men is just 47 years. As Huey says in his powerful TEDx Talk, the photo project soon became much more — an effort to understand the history of the native Lakota people, “a time-line of treaties made, treaties broken.”

Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)
Since 2000, according to Bono’s data, eight million more AIDS patients are getting antiretroviral drugs; eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa have cut their rates of death due to malaria by 75 percent, and the mortality rate for kids under five has fallen by 2.65 million per year—that’s 7,256 lives saved every day.

“This fantastic news didn’t happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. And this great news gives birth to even more great news,” Bono says: the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day has declined from 43 percent in 1990, to 33 percent in 2000, to 21 percent in 2010. “If you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data,” Bono says. “This is everything.”

According to Bono’s calculations, if this trend continues, 2028 will see zero percent of the population living in extreme poverty.

“The opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can’t get this done until we accept that we can get this done,” says Bono. “Inertia is how we screw this up. Momentum is how we bend the arc of history down towards zero.”

Don’t miss this inspiring talk with a powerful message about the past 3,000 years of history. And for anyone interested in what it means to live in extreme poverty today, here is a series of nuanced essays and interviews that give insight.

In February 2010, John Lee Anderson reported from post-earthquake Haiti in The New Yorker. The piece follows Nadia Francois, who was deported back to Haiti from the U.S.; through her story, we see a country not only ravaged by poverty, violence and political upheaval, but also “almost uniquely victimized by nature,” Anderson writes..

Until recently, Mali “was widely viewed as a gentle if very poor democracy,” Joshua Hammer wrote in The New York Review of Books last month. “But the country has long combined poverty, radical Islam, and tendencies to armed rebellion.” In 2011, he writes, that “combustible mix” came to a head as northern Mali became a terrorist haven..

In her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo chronicles life in a slum in Mumbai, India, based on three years of research. In this interview in Guernica, Boo discusses her aim to investigate “what I didn’t know: how people get out of poverty,” she says. “Mumbai, especially, had so many contradictions. You have this manifest prosperity, but then more than half of its citizens lived in slums. The life expectancy in Mumbai is seven years shorter than the country as a whole. How can that be in one of India’s wealthiest cities?”.

In 2011, Philip Gourevitch wrote for The New Yorkerabout a cycling team in Rwanda through which boys like Gasore, an orphaned street kid, found second chances..

Rio will host the World Cup in 2013 and the Olympics in 2016. Which puts the spotlight on “the persistent presence of the militias and drug gangs controlling its favelas, these fearfully poor but hardy communities located all across town,” Misha Glenny wrote in FT Magazine last fall. “The juxtaposition of opulence and misery in Rio highlights the moral disgrace of Brazil’s historical legacy. At the same time, it forces the authorities to make good on the genuine commitment of President Dilma Rousseff and her two predecessors to banish the scourge of chronic inequality.”.

In 2011, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a decade-later follow-up to her book Nickel and Dimed, in which she went undercover as a minimum-wage employee to report on the extreme hardships Americans in poverty faced.

In 2005, the TED Prize was given to Bono. Eight years later, Chris Anderson asks, has there been any progress? The U2 frontman is here to tell us. But first, some good-natured Anglo-Irish joshing. “Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes. That’s an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct?” Bono is incredulous; the audience seems happy to laugh at both nations.

Bono’s passion: countering what Nelson Mandela refers to as “that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty.” His weapon of choice? Facts. “Forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks,” he says. “The only thing singing today will be the facts. I have truly embraced my inner nerd. Exit the rock star.” He removes his trademark sunglasses. “Enter the evidence-based activist.” He puts his glasses back on upside down. Bono is now a “factivist.” And he has the infographic-filled slides to prove it.

Here’s the surprise: there’s a lot of good news. Since 2000, eight million AIDS patients have been receiving retroviral drugs; malaria deaths have been cut by 75%; child mortality rate of kids under 5 is down by 2.65 million deaths a year. “Let’s think about that,” he says. “Have you read anything, anywhere in the last week that is as remotely as important as that number? It’s great news, and it drives me nuts most people don’t know this.”

More stats. Bono clearly has good graphic designers on staff. The number of people living in soul-crushing poverty declined from 43% in 1990 to 33% in 2000 to 21% by 2010. The audience approves and yet, he acknowledges, the rate is still too high. “If you live on less than $1.25 a day, this is not just data. This is everything. If you’re a parent who wants the best for your kids, and I am, this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope.”

Can the trajectory continue? Bono has tracked it forward. “If the trajectory continues, look at the number of people living on a dollar a day by 2030: zero. That can’t be true, can it?” But it is. The Zero Zone is possible, even for troubled countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Think of the benefits if this actually transpires, Bono challenges. For one thing, he jokes, “you won’t have to listen to an insufferable jumped-up Jesus like myself.” And 2030 is just around the corner. “That’s only three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away.” The audience laughs, even more when the singer adds drily, “I’m hoping. They make us look really young.”

Here’s the rub. We can’t take any of this for granted. “The opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can’t get this done until we accept that we can get this done. Inertia is how we screw this up. Momentum is how we bend the arc of history down towards zero.” But fighting those who would stand in the way of positive progress is a responsibility for everyone. Fighting corruption is easier by means of transparency and openness, and it’s critical that we all play our part. He cites a report from Uganda, where millennials are reporting and exposing government corruption by means of 2G phones and SMS messages.

“Once you have these tools, you can’t not use them. You can’t delete this data from your brain,” says Bono. “You can delete the cliché image from your brain of supplicant impoverished people not having control of their own lives. That’s not true.”

So can everyone here at TED also take up the cause, become so-called “factivists”? Bono’s on the hard sell. “We’re here to try and infect you with this virtuous database virus, the one we call factivism. It’s not going to kill you; it could save countless lives. We in the One campaign would love you to be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on. By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken. The ever-demanding journey of equality. Could we answer that clarion call of Nelson Mandela with science, reason, facts and dare I say it, emotion?”

In conclusion, Bono quotes Wael Ghonim, the former Googler who used social networking and technology tools with such effect in the Egyptian uprising. “I have his words tattooed on my brain,” says Bono. “We’re going to win because we don’t understand politics. We’re going to win because we don’t play their dirty games. We’re going to win because we don’t have an agenda. We’re going to win because the tears that comes from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We’re going to win because we have dreams. We’re going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams.”

“He’s right,” Bono reminds us. “We’ll win if we work together as one, the people. The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.” And, for the man who earlier confessed that applause was his weakness, a standing ovation.

Over the past two days, TEDxWomen brought together 50 speakers from around the globe, each giving a different slice of thinking on the state of women today. Here, a selection of the powerful talks from this event, which was produced and curated by The Paley Center for Media.

Session 1: The space between Poverty and Plenty

Malehlohonolo Moleko, small business owner Malehlohonolo boarded an airplane for the first time ever this week, flying from her home in South Africa to Washington, D.C., for TEDxWomen. In 2006, Moleko started a baking business and took out a loan from a bank. But she quickly realized that she had no idea how to manage accounts. “It was so embarrassing,” says Moleko of falling behind on payments and not being able to afford ingredients. Luckily, Moleko found a training program for women in business and it turned her prospects around. Her idea: end poverty by making business education and mentorship available to women. Says Moleko, “When you are determined to work hard and wise enough to seek help, anything is possible.”

Jacki Zehner, investor and philanthropist. Jacki is being the youngest woman and first female trader to become a partner at Goldman Sachs. But in 2002, she left the company with a mission: to create a guide for those interested in seeing more female faces in board rooms and on trader floors. In this talk, Zehner calls on us all to support companies that show they respect female leadership, to sponsor female innovators on Kickstarter and to urge venture capitalists to fund female-headed startups. (As Gayle Tzemach Lemmon shared in her talk, which opened the session, only 5% of venture capital goes to women.) Zehner says, “What we buy and who we buy it from is one of the most important decisions we make every day. Imagine if we used that power.”

Rosie Rios, Treasurer of the United States. Rosie Rios is the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, and her name is, literally, on your money. When she met Carlos Slim, the richest man to the world, at a luncheon in 2010, she joked to him, “I’m probably the only person in the world who makes more money than you do.” In this heartfelt talk, Rios describes being one of eight children raised by a single mother. And she shares great pride in the fact that there are currently seven confirmed women in the Treasury — the most of any administration — and in the fact that they have set up a permanent exhibit about the women in the Treasury.

Session 2: The space between Fact and Faith

Sister Joan Chittister, Benedictine nun. Sister Joan began her talk with a bold statement: “The second class status of women in our society has always been a matter of faith.” She delves into the roots of it — the Abrahamic creation story in which man was created first. But as Chittister says, “Darwin is reshaping the way we think about creation. We are at crossover moment in time — what was considered true up to this time will not be considered true after this time … Science is giving us a God big enough to believe in.” Instead of a God who personally designed the features of our world in one swoop, could it be that creation is a work in progress. And that each of us plays a part?

Eboo Patel, interfaith youth leaderEboo Patel’s grandmother constantly urged him to marry a nice Muslim girl. It was a message he wasn’t interested in hearing as a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, feeling intense anger at the injustices of the world. In making his way as an activist, Patel was introduced to the work Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, who he calls “the most radical person of 20th century” for her generosity. When he realized that Day was delivering the same message as his grandmother — that God is at the root of caring for others — he finally embraced his religion. Now an interfaith leader, Patel says, “The reason I’m on this path is because of two female faith leaders.”

Session 3: The space between IQ and EQ

Charlotte Beers, advertising legend. In a story-filled talk, Charlotte gives advice to women when it comes to work. First, know yourself — including your negative traits and the baggage you carry. Second, speak with clarity and cultivate persuasiveness. “Be prepared to step out of the team and say, ‘I believe.’ Have them understand that you mean it and they will believe you,” she says. “When you turn around, they’re following you. That is leadership … I just want you ready for every single moment of leadership that comes your way.”

Shabana Basij-Rasikh, education advocate. When the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, Shabana remembers what her father said: “You can go to a real school now.” In her household, education was treasured — even for girls. Basij-Rasikh went on to attend Middlebury College and, on a break in Kabul, there was an attempt on her father’s life. The bombers called the house, and told her father not to send her back to college. In an emotional talk, Basij-Rasikh recalls her father’s brave words: “Kill me now if you wish, but I will not ruin my daughter’s future because of your old and backwards ideas.” Watch Shabana’s TED Talk: Dare to educate Afghan girls.

Brittany Wenger, Google Science Fair winner. “I was that kid who never outgrew the ‘why’ phase,” says 17-year-old Brittany. In this talk, she shares how — after her cousin battled breast cancer — she had an idea to combine her interests in medical research and computer science to improve breast cancer detection. Essentially, Wegner taught a computer to answer the question, “Is this tumor malignant or benign?” with 99.1% accuracy. Wegner’s artificial neural network should only get more accurate with more samples and her work could make the least invasive test for breast cancer, fine-needle aspiration, the most effective. Read our interview with Brittany Wenger.

Session 4: The Mirror, the space between what we see and what we reflect

Sue Austin, artist. When Sue got her wheelchair, she felt a tremendous sense of freedom. But at the same time, she says, “It was as if an invisibility cloak descended,” with others seeing her chair as a symbol of loss and limitation. Austin decided to use art to bridge the gap between how she viewed herself and how others saw her. A must-see example: this video of Sue exploring a coral reef in an underwater wheelchair, which unites a chair with scuba gear. Watch Sue’s TED Talk: Deep-sea diving … in a wheelchair

Anita Sarkeesian, media critic. Anita had what she thought was a simple idea: to make a series of videos exploring the tropes of women in video games. But when she posted the project on Kickstarter, she got a reaction she never expected — a tidal wave of hate. For anyone who thinks that being online bullied is no big deal, she shows some of the messages she received — many threaten rape and some death.Her critics circulated her phone number and her home address. But many stepped up to Sarkeesian’s defense, donating to her Kickstarter initiative. While she had set out to raise $6,000, in the end she raised nearly $159,000.

Angela Patton, community leader. Angela works with teenage girls, and knows there is one relationship they crave: their relationship with their father. In this talk, Patton explains how she and her students dreamed up the idea of a father/daughter dance. And how, since one of the girl’s fathers was in jail, they brought the event to the prison. Watch Angela’s TED Talk: A father-daughter dance — in prison.

Session 5: The space between life’s Stops and Starts

Bob and Lee Woodruff, journalist and author. Lee Woodruff was at Disney World with her four children when she got the call that her husband, Bob Woodruff — who had just been appointed the co-anchor of World News on ABC — had been hit by a roadside bomb and was in a coma. “You can’t ask, ‘Why me?’ You don’t have time to ring your hands,” says Lee. “You can be bitter or you can get better.” In this banter-filled talk, Bob shares details of his physical recovery and Lee reveals how she relied on four ‘f’s to get her through: family, friends, faith and funny. In their home a sign now reads, “If it’s not fatal, it’s fine.”

Janine di Giovanni, war correspondent. “This is how war starts—one day you’re living your ordinary life … Next thing, the telephones go out, the TV goes off and there are armed men on the streets,” says journalist Janine di Giovanni. “People don’t want to believe war is coming.” In this powerful talk, di Giovanni shares that the conflict that affected her most was Sarajevo, where people lived under siege without water, power, electricity and food for three years. While the devastation and loss of life was terrible, di Giovanni says that she also saw incredible love there. On Saturday, Di Giovanni will head back to Syria. So why does she continue to cover war? As she explains, “What I see is incredibly heroic people fighting for things we take for granted every single day.” Watch Janine’s TED Talk: What I saw in the war

Session six: The Rising, the space between Seeing and Doing

Isatou Touray, women’s health advocate. Isatou was 10 years old when she came home to a big celebration, full of costumes in dance. Says Touray, “I thought, ‘This is the day I’m to be a woman.’” Instead, her genitals were mutilated. Touray could never understand how this was a part of her faith. Today, Touray’s organization — GAMCOTRAP — is dedicated to eradicating genital mutilation in The Gambia, a fight which has sent her to jail 66 times. “We have to come together and save the next generation from this dangerous practice,” she says.

iO Tillett Wright, photographer. As a child, iO lived as a boy — going as far as to turn around her shoes in bathroom stalls so it would look like she was standing up. But as she grew up, she reframed her identity as a tomboyish girl who had been in love with women and men. “I wasn’t asked to define myself by my parents,” says Wright. “I was just told to be me, growing and changing at every moment.” It’s from this standpoint that Wright approaches what she calls “the civil rights cause of my generation.” On the stage, Wright shared images from her series, Self-Evident Truths, for which she photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves anywhere on the LBGTQ spectrum. As she found, most people consider themselves to exist in the grey areas of sexuality, which presents a problem when it comes to discrimination. “Where exactly do you draw the line?” says Wright. “Where exactly does someone become a second class citizen?” Watch iO’s TED Talk: 50 shades of gay.

Sunitha Krishnan’s talk was easily the most talked-about at TEDIndia, and sharing it with the world on TED.com provoked emotional reactions from many people — all showing support for her and her work. She chatted with the TEDBlog on Sunday, to give just a little more insight on her critically important efforts against human trafficking and the sex trade, recounting the emotional journey of creating Prajwala and explaining how our silence can enable abuse.

In your talk, you shared the personal story of your attack and explained how alone, isolated and even stigmatized you felt afterward. For those of us who don’t live in India, could you explain what that situation was like, especially culturally? What did you go through and what do the girls you work with go through in their families and communities?

Actually, I think the kind of isolation I felt is something very global. I don’t think it’s very cultural. Of course the cultural context has different manifestations, but the isolation a victim of sexual violence goes through I think is a global phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of it or the face of it that may change in different countries.

In my country, it might be something very verbal, something very physical. People might outwardly blame you for this thing happening, questioning your parents by asking, “Why did you allow her so much freedom?” or parents may actually question the girl by asking, “Why did you go there?” It’s a very emotional drama. Also, the perception of the people around you can change — people tell their children, “Don’t talk to this girl. She’s kind of a morally loose person.” People will tell their children not to mingle with this girl because she does not have a good character.

Now, these are some of the faces that I would see here and even some things that I have experienced myself. I’m sure in other cultural contexts it would mean an emotional isolation. Most people aren’t able to understand what this person is going through, whether it is the violation, the pain, the trauma and most importantly, the sense of dirtiness that one feels inside. No matter what people say, that feeling does not leave immediately. The fact that there have been foreign hands, somebody who you don’t know, somebody who you don’t want to has touched you against your wishes, that sense of being violated gives you a very dirty sense within. You feel cheapened. It takes a little while to be comfortable with your body. It takes a little while to say, “I’m alright.” You don’t feel alright within.

So, I think there are two kinds of isolation one goes through. One is the isolation within, going through the process of understanding your own body, not liking your body and also going through a certain amount of guilt and pain, thinking that you are actually responsible for what happened to you. Then there’s the external isolation, and here there is so much shame involved, so many honor issues involved, family prestige is involved. Your family asks, “Now, why do you want to talk about this? Why do you want to go around telling this story? Isn’t it bad enough that you’ve brought so much family shame?” The fact that you are a victim is lost on most people. Most of the discussions are about how to hide this issue, and the more you hide it and suppress it is the more the isolation from within increases.

I’ve met people who’ve been sexually abused in the United States, I’ve met people in Europe. They all have a similar kind of isolation from within — the pain, the trauma, the guilt. It’s all the same. In a different cultural context like the one I live in, in India, it’s also combined with a very real, tangible social isolation. We’re a very close-knit society, and everybody knows everybody, families are very close. We live in joint families, in a very close-knit family structure. There’s so much shame and family honor, very hypocritical external factors, added to this.

Now, mine is a one-time incident. When you talk about my girls, you’re talking about a systemic incidence. You’re talking about centuries of isolation. Their isolation is such that they are born into the fringes of society. It’s not just about a family saying, “You have shamed us.” It’s about the whole society saying you’re a fallen person, you’re a morally loose person, you’re somebody who doesn’t belong to the society and you’re somebody who has no right to mix with the larger society. Therefore, you, your shadow, your children’s presence, anything that is a part of you is not welcome in the society. You’re not a part of the society. That is what my girls go through. That is not something that people forget. It’s like their faces are branded. They go through labeling, it is stamped on them forever. You are that. You are eternally morally loose, and therefore you have no right to come back to this so-called moral society. Somebody like me, and my trauma and my isolation cannot compare to this kind of a trauma. I’ve gone past there, and people no longer associate me with that incident. Everybody accepts me. Today I tell my story and it doesn’t conjure any isolation or stigma, but for my girls, it’s a very long haul.

No matter how many stories I tell, the larger feeling in the world does not change in this respect. I’ve had situations where people have had lengthy discussions with me, and I’ve spent upwards of two and three hours talking to them about this issue, and often when they seem to understand they don’t, really. I won’t mention the name of the place, but there was one particular place that the girls went to, where it took a lot of effort to work with the employer. I spent a couple of hours of talking to this person and I thought the situation could work, but every time my girl who was working there talked to a male colleague, immediately I would get a call — “Oh Sunitha, you know this girl is getting very friendly with the men here.” So you see, her every move is watched. She can’t be friendly to a man, she can’t fall in love with anybody. I remember this particular girl falling in love with a co-worker there, and the employer actually called the co-worker and told him what her background was, saying, “How dare you fall in love with this girl? You have no idea what her background is.” He also called the girl and said, “How dare you fall in love with this chap? Don’t you know where you’ve come from?”

This is a kind of isolation I am not able to digest. This is a kind of isolation I don’t know how to come to terms with, and this is where I feel like a failure. How much more can you explain to these people? I think I’ve told them enough. I’ve taken hours to tell them this story.

Could you explain how you came to begin Prajwala? When did you decide that this was something you wanted to do and where did you find the resources to begin helping these young women?

The name Prajwala came later in life, but knowing that I wanted to be with these women, that I wanted to do something for these children was there from an early age. It was figuring out how I would do it and what I would do that took some time to evolve. After I finished college, I was in Bangalore for a little while and I did a lot of counseling with these women and understanding their problems, but not starting anything in particular. In the meantime, I did a lot of strong bonding with these people through various incidents that brought us closer to each other. But, I wasn’t really doing anything for them yet, because I didn’t know what I should be doing.

Then, I was arrested for protesting (against the 1995 Miss World contest held in Bangalore) and had to spend some time in jail. I experienced isolation from a different angle. I was in the jail for months and I experienced rejection, complete rejection from family and such. That was another experience that molded me in a very big way. There was a physical isolation, in terms of not meeting people, and nobody coming to you and nobody bothering to see how she’s doing or what she’s doing and what kind of conditions she’s living in. I remember days waiting for somebody to come. My father tried coming and he did come once or twice, but my mother, my sisters and my brother and even my friends, they didn’t think it was important to see me in jail. I remember, there was this huge door and during the day there would be a knock, and the whole jail would fall silent. Everybody was waiting to see who was being called to have a visitor. I spent days and weeks waiting for my name to be called and facing the disappointment of not being called. I remember the day when I was released from jail — not a single family member or friend was there to receive me outside. Many of my co-activists had a lot of people come to receive them, and so I felt a kind of a rejection.

In many ways, this was my turning point in understanding what it means to be on the fringes of society. My rape did not make me feel that. Yes, there was a stigma, there was isolation, a lot of emotional isolation, but there was not physical isolation. I was still within the family. Now, I experienced absolute physical rejection. I was not part of anything. People did not come to see me. Nobody claimed me and I was not connected to anybody. The sense of loneliness that goes with that was a very interesting firsthand experience for me and it helped consolidate my thinking. I learned exactly what my women and children go through, and therefore all my efforts, my life, my breath, my being was then dedicated to that. There was no looking back now.

I left Bangalore under these circumstances and then reached Hyderabad. Coincidentally, at the same time there was a red light area in Hyderabad that was shut down, and there were a lot of women put into jail. That’s when we decided to start Prajwala. In the beginning, we asked the women what they wanted from us. They said, “Forget about us. Do something for our children.” And that’s how Prajwala was born, as an initiative for their children. It started with just about five children. We had no money, we had nothing except a pair of gold earrings that I owned. I sold those earrings and that’s the first funding we had. I was living a very frugal existence, staying in the slums. I was the first teacher in the school that we started.
We looked at it like a partnership. From the beginning, we realized that we were not gods coming here to save somebody. We were coming to work as partners with the persons involved. That’s how we started our school with five children. Today, we have 5,000 children studying in 17 schools. Five children became 10 children, which became 15 children. After the first school started, people from that area started coming and demanding other schools. So, again, one school became two schools and now we have 17 schools. But also the partnership and the bond between us and the mothers became very strong. I remember systematically having discussions with these women, asking them, “How do you feel when you know that they should be in school, and your child is prostituting on the road?” And, information about children started coming in — there’s a eight-year-old child who’s prostituting here, and a 12-year-old child who’s prostituting there.

Mothers are our first informers. Many of the women who are prostituting are also mothers. They’re the ones who actually tell us where the child is. Then when we come in, we have to do something. I do remember at that time trying to get the police’s support, in vain of course. You realize there are a lot of issues with getting support when doing this work. At first, only the mothers supported us.

And, for some time, we didn’t know what to do with these children. We didn’t know where to take them, so we contacted other people to keep these children. But, it didn’t work out because most organizations said that they were corrupting their other children. They said that it was not good to have them in their facilities, because other children would get spoiled. There was one child of mine that I placed in an orphanage, and this child told me, “Aunty, you have dropped me from one hell to another hell.” That was it. I decided we needed to start our own shelter. So we took a small house and started up our shelter for children.

Now, we are supported by a small number of people giving us money, small donors. At one point, we started getting noticed for our work and the money started coming in. But when we started our shelter, we didn’t know how we would get support. I was the first cook and caretaker of my shelter. And a couple of weeks in, we discovered that most of the children were HIV positive. Everything was happening around us, and we came to know about it as we went along. There was no preparation. We didn’t have a chance to sit down and plan for HIV or the trauma involved. Everything evolved over a period of time.

Then the rescue just expanded. We began moving across the state of Andhra Pradesh. Then, we started moving to other states in the country — to Delhi, to Bombay, to many other places. And then we realized another huge thing, that a child who was raped two or three times, who was only just inducted into prostitution and the girl who’s been in prostitution for 10 years, these are two different mentalities. What worked with this child does not work with this young girl. For example, when we went to Delhi we were with three 15-year-old girls, already in prostitution for five or six years. These young girls were totally different from a child rescued much earlier. It didn’t make sense to put these two people together, and that’s why from one shelter we moved on to the second shelter. By this time our funding had crystallized, we had donors like UNICEF and UNIFEM — all these agencies were not only monetarily supporting us, but lent more credibility to the organization.

With children, education worked but with young girls we had to explore the possibility of livelihood. This is why we started exploring livelihood options. We were the first in the country to actually explore the possibility of corporate social partnership. I remember international organizations who had migrated to India coming to our rescue at the time. We had a breakthrough with International Organization for Migration who helped us begin a chain of pizza parlors. This was the beginning of real partnerships, where people could actually partner with our program to help us, without giving us money or doing charity. This was more sustainable. This had much more important implications in the lives of the girls.

Our partnerships continued to expand, to different corporate hospitals, corporate hotels and many different places. I can’t mention the names, largely to ensure the confidentiality of our program and the confidentiality of our girls. In our corporate social partnerships, the most important part is to ensure confidentiality, because you really don’t know how different people will react to these situations. We felt very strongly compelled and we chose to start expanding and exploring the market.

I also felt very strongly that trades, especially male-dominated trades, should be explored. These girls are very strong. They don’t fear the world. They’ve already crossed that hurdle. I also had reason to believe that succeeding at something very male-dominated could have a very therapeutic impact. That’s how we started teaching welding and carpentry to the girls. And it had a really miraculous impact on their hearts and minds. Some of the girls said they felt on top of the world. They were no longer rejected by the outside world, they were on par with men and sometimes even doing better than men. That’s extremely empowering for these girls. Today we run our own small training unit teaching screenprinting, welding, carpentry, masonry, motor mechanics — all very male-dominated trades. It’s not just the economic empowerment, it’s also psychologically restorative.

Then, we went out to expand our prevention program. Remember all of this had begun with second generation prevention. So we went back to it. We started going to villages, we started going to the slums, we started going to the schools, talking about these issues and educating people about these issues. We explained to people that we all need to be aware of it, we all need to be vigilant about it, we need to fight for the children. And, we started to work with men, talking to them about their side of the issue. We formed a group called MAD, Men Against Demand, by which we mean the demand for prostitution. We need to address this problem not just from the supply end, but from the perspective of demand also. This is a very interesting and very strong campaign.

In our journey, one of the big lessons we have learnt is that we cannot do things alone. Partnership is important. If you believe you can do it all on your own, you’re a fool. You need to partner with people, and one important stakeholder you need to partner with is the government. You have to start working with the government, you need to start advising them about the problem and pushing them to take some action. Also, we work with the police, we work with law enforcement, sensitizing and training them. We tell them how to deal with people in these situations. Today I know hundreds and thousands of wonderful police officers, who do so much to help. This is as a result of partnership. So today we are in a position where we partner with the government, with the law enforcement and with the judiciary to bring a collective change.

I want to revisit something you just mentioned. You talked about men and demand, and in your TEDTalk you also mentioned that the men who support industry are also men in regular society. You seemed to imply in your talk that we should take the responsibility to address this, that we shouldn’t let these things go or see them as something that is not our business.

Yes, I would say that often, even within our own families we have experiences of some kind of issue like this. It may not come from our fathers or brothers, there’s often some uncle or somebody further removed that we know is committing acts like this. When we keep quiet, that’s where it all begins.

When a father abuses his own daughter or a brother abuses his own sister, we sometimes keep quiet because it’s too shameful to talk about. We don’t take action because we don’t want to talk about it. And, when this happens, this man gains a huge amount of confidence. This person feels confident to do what he wants to do, because he thinks that nobody is going to say anything about it. So yes, it begins with our silence.

In fact, when it comes to incest, there are hundreds and millions of people across the world it has happened to, but who have never talked about it. They are so ashamed that they live with it for years. But, what have done with this silence? They have promoted violence. They have sanctioned violence. They have allowed a man to become an abuser for a lifetime. This man has no qualms to go and ask for a five-year-old child to have sex with, because when you can to do it to your own child, you have no problem doing it somebody else’s. I think that silence needs to be addressed today. We, the rest of the world, need to object. We need to question those men, we need to question our culture of silence.

We have come a long way. We have rescued more than 3,200 children. We have programs for rescue, economic empowerment, rehabilitation, prevention and more. We’re doing it all. But it’s not enough. Every one of us has to be conscious of what’s going on. We have to become a voice for every child, because his silence or her silence or anybody’s silence promotes something else.

When you came to TEDIndia to present your ideas, to share your voice, what was that like for you? How were those ideas received and what did you think of the whole experience?

I came to TEDIndia with quite a bit of fear, and I was not so keen to go. I felt like a fish out of water on the first day. There were all these brilliant achievers and when I heard people speaking, I thought, “My God, what am I doing here? I don’t have any fantastic invention. I don’t belong to this place.” When my presentation came, I was a bundle of nerves. Everybody else was changing the world, changing technology, bringing hope, and my story is a depressing story. I didn’t even speak my full 18 minutes, I was so nervous.

But, after I finished my presentation and I saw the reaction, the first feeling I had was, “God, there are so many people and they are so compassionate. They understand this problem. They understand what I’m saying.” I can’t tell you the amount of strength that gave me. It also gave me great hope, and the anger that surrounds this issue for me actually diluted a little. All these people made me feel so special and good about what I do. I was surprised at how many people were reaching out to me emotionally.

There were also the offers of money that happened immediately. At first, I also was not sure that these would come through. It was a very nice feeling to be offered. Just the fact that somebody offered, was really nice. But, having worked in this area a while, I take these things with not just a grain, but a bag of salt. However, $100,000 is what was pledged during the TEDIndia conference, and today I have received around $200,000. The support came from many different people, some of them were not from India, but many of them were and that is also very important.

You see, even more helpful than the money is the kind of support I now have, because if I have a problem, I can call somebody who can help. For example, right now I’m having a problem because I did not bribe an income tax official, so I’ve been classified right now as though I’m not doing charitable work but as if I’m doing profit-making work. As a result, the income tax bureau has passed an order for around $100,000 in taxes. So, right now, I’m in the middle of a crisis and trying to find people to appeal this order. And, the TEDsters have been pledging their support, they’re supporting me and connecting me to the right people to get this cleared up. So, what has significantly changed is that today, I don’t feel alone. There are people who believe in me and there are people who are standing by me. That’s what TEDIndia has given me.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/qa_with_sunitha/feed/9shannacarpenterSunithaKrishnan_interview.jpgMuhammad Yunus' 3 ways to save the developing worldhttp://blog.ted.com/muhammad_yunus/
http://blog.ted.com/muhammad_yunus/#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2009 09:44:29 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/01/muhammad_yunus/[…]]]>Via the Daily Beast : An excerpt from "Creating a World Without Poverty," by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank. In this essay, Yunus offers three thoughts about how luckier countries can help the developing world during this credit crisis, when gains of the past few years are being erased. The key: social business.Read the essay >>]]>http://blog.ted.com/muhammad_yunus/feed/1tedstaffStAR: Helping poor countries get their money backhttp://blog.ted.com/star_helping_po/
http://blog.ted.com/star_helping_po/#commentsFri, 21 Sep 2007 08:44:10 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2007/09/star_helping_po/[…]]]>

This week, the UN and the World Bank launched the Stolen Asset Recovery initiative, or StAR — a plan to help poor countries recover funds stolen by corrupt leaders and stashed overseas. According to Reuters:

World Bank estimates that cross-border flow of global proceeds from criminal activities, corruption and tax evasion is between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion.

Meanwhile, 25 percent of the gross domestic product of African states is lost to corruption every year at the cost of about $148 billion.

In her talk at TED2007 in Monterey, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala talks about such stolen national assets, and why recovering them has significance far beyond the money involved. Okonjo-Iweala knows the problem from the inside out: When she was the Finance Minister of Nigeria, she launched an unprecedented suit to recover funds that the dictator Sani Abacha had stashed overseas. After 5 years in court, the suit recovered $500 million from Swiss banks — just a fraction of the estimated $3 billion to $5 billion that Abacha is believed to have stolen, according to AllAfrica.com.